


At Dawn

by Meltha



Category: Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Post Movie, Yuletide 2007
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-10
Updated: 2011-11-10
Packaged: 2017-10-25 21:47:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/275149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meltha/pseuds/Meltha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The sun rose that morning, and the world went on. But for Jim, the world ended at dawn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	At Dawn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zeldadestry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeldadestry/gifts).



> Disclaimer: All characters from the movie _Rebel without a Cause_. No profit is made from this work of fiction.
> 
> Written for zeldadestry for Yuletide 2007.

Life kept going after that night at the planetarium. Somehow it seemed as though it shouldn’t have, but it did. Every day passed in only twenty-four hours, but Jim learned quickly that was a cosmic joke. Some days lasted forever, like that one when the world stopped in its tracks and Judy arrived, and Plato, and Buzz died, and Plato, and Plato, always Plato.

Always Plato.

Other days, though, were gone in a blink and forgotten, never to be thought of again because they were the stuff of the taste of white bread and smell of stale air and days spent staring out the window at nothing. They had no flavor, so they dissolved away, and one was so much like the last that it might as well have been the same one. That’s the way the rest of his senior year passed: a line of tasteless, colorless days.

The police had found out quickly enough about the chicky race. They let it go. No one, they claimed, had killed Buzz except Buzz’s own stupidity. The officer behind the desk had said that in front of Jim, and the one charge against Jim that stuck was assault when he had hammered the guy’s head into a desk for saying it. He’d gotten ten days in juvenile hall. He’d laughed when the judge gave the sentence because he knew he wasn’t a juvenile, not some damn kid who they could send to his room or a soft state institution for a few days and have everything be ginger peachy again when he came back, all forgiven and clean as the day he was born. Nothing was ever going to be clean and pure again.

School came and went, and he was suddenly a high school graduate, out to claim the world, as his father put it. There was Judy still, still and always. He thought he might have gone nuts without her, and he felt maybe there was something pure still in the world when he smelled lily of the valley soap on her skin, soft and gentle and good. But even that was tainted; sometimes he wondered if she’d smelled like that to Buzz, too.

He and Judy left after graduation. His mother had pitched a fit, but Dad had turned out alright in the end and told her that Jim was on his own now. There’d been tears, and that had been bad in its own way because Jim never wanted to hurt them, not really, he just needed… even now he couldn’t explain what he needed, but it burned him to move or die. At Judy’s home there’d been worse that tears when he came for her. She left with her father screaming names after her that made Jim want to deck somebody again, but not Judy’s father, not now, not when she needed him.

They headed up the coast because it seemed like the right direction when they got in his car. They didn’t have much besides each other, but that was more than a lot of people had, as Jim pointed out. He drove with her head against his shoulder, and the window was rolled down, making her hair flutter against his cheek in the wind. It was one of those moments that stretched out into forever, out with the gulls flying over the ocean to the horizon they’d never quite reach because it was always ahead of them. The air in the car was warm, and it smelled of lily of the valley and cigarettes and dawn.

When they ran out of money for gas, they stopped, and for a while everything was fine. Jim started working on a fishing trawler for a captain who was gruff but decent enough in his way. He and Judy lived in a cheap apartment near the wharf. Judy worked as a waitress in the town’s only diner. He’d be gone for a week at a time sometimes, but when he came home, she smiled, and everything was right again. It was always right again for a little while when Judy smiled, even if dinner was baked beans again. But then the rush of the waves got too loud, started sounding like a car falling, landing on the rocks below in a pile of twisted metal and fire. When that happened, he’d need her. Even in the worst of it, he was never rough with her. She was part of him, a part that for once he never wanted to be anything but safe and loved, and since he treated her that way, she did the same for him too, and it was a circle, not a perfect one maybe, but a circle, and it was strong.

It was September when Judy realized she was pregnant. He guessed he should have known it would happen eventually, but they both sat there in the crummy little room and stared at one another when they realized what it meant. Long minutes passed.

“You wanna get married?” he asked finally, the words sounding strangely loud in the room.

“What?” she asked. Her expression was like she’d just been suddenly awakened from a deep sleep.

“I mean, I love you and all,” he said quickly. “We’d be good, you know, not like what we come from or nothing.”

“I… guess,” she said, turning her head to one side. “I mean, yes, alright.”

They’d gotten married the next weekend at the Justice of the Peace, Jim in a suit he hadn’t even remembered packing and Judy in a pink skirt and pale yellow sweater. He’d picked her a bouquet of chrysanthemums from the neighbor’s front porch, and they’d laughed about it, laughed nervously. And then it was over again, in the flash of an eye, Mr. and Mrs. Stark, now kiss the bride and everyone will very kindly pretend they don’t notice when seven months from now there’s a baby.

It was a boy. Jim couldn’t seem to take his eyes away from the incredibly tiny person who was pulling at his thumb with a grip much too strong for something smaller than a loaf of bread. He was hooked. He smiled at Judy, that lazy, open smile that had made her fall for him in a single day.

“So, what’s his name?” he asked her, his tone teasing. “I’d like to be properly introduced.”

Judy bit her lip a moment, then said, “John. I’d like him to be John.”

Jim pulled back a little, his face falling as he turned away.

“Jamie? Is that alright?” she asked tentatively.

He didn’t turn back but shook his head and walked out the door. He stood on the porch of their dingy apartment building and started to sob in dry heaves. People walking past may have been staring, but he didn’t care, didn’t notice, wasn’t aware of anybody else existing. It had been almost exactly a year since Plato’s body had been frozen for a moment when the bullet hit it, when the world stopped revolving and he’d fallen slowly, so slowly, towards the ground and landed without any sound Jim could hear. Jim remembered screaming that he had the bullets, praying that he wasn’t really dead, just playing another game, but Plato’s games had always been deadly when he thought back on it. He spared a thought to wonder about the housekeeper. She had seemed nice. He doubted anyone ever listened to what she had to say either. That was the real trouble with the world, nobody listening. She’d just stood there as they’d dressed his corpse for the ambulance, muttering, the words falling on deaf ears, and he realized that she’d probably been left standing there, mourning alone. Alone was the worst thing in life. She’d been the closest Plato had to a mother, but Jim didn’t even know her name. It wasn’t right.

It wasn’t right that a fifteen year old kid died wearing two different colored socks like some sick joke. It wasn’t right that Buzz was spattered to death on sea rocks. It wasn’t right that Jim’s parents would never understand, never know who he was or who he wanted to be or listen to anything but the sounds of his own voice. It wasn’t right that Judy’s wouldn’t see her as anything but a whore. There were a whole lot of things not right, but the worst was that the dead wouldn’t stay dead. Ghosts clustered around him, too many of them, on the ocean, in the apartment, in the car, too many fractured moments from time that wouldn’t stop being there, wouldn’t do what any self-respecting moment would do and fade into the past like time was supposed to instead of being stuck, dawning again and again, the pain always fresh as the first light of day and the sun never passing across the face of the sky to move on to the next moment and the next.

He felt Judy’s hand on his shoulder and turned to see her holding their son, her face sad.

“I’m sorry, Jamie,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make it hurt worse.”

“You can’t ‘cause it can’t get no worse,” he said, but he kissed the hand that still rested light as snow on his shoulder. “It’s okay. He’s John. Aren’t you, kiddo?”

Give it ten years, or so his father said. Give it ten years and none of this will matter anymore. Jim didn’t believe it, because it would never really be ten years from now. It would be perpetual dawn, and the world would always be ending, each second. Still, if the world was going to end, at least he wouldn’t be alone while it was happening. There was something to be said for that.


End file.
